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Have Hanes and the Hormel Foods Corporation been secretly in cahoots with one another? It looks as though the seemingly disparate industries have no plausible reason to cross paths. Well, looks like I prematurely shot my wad and based the whole premise of this article on some brash assumptions that had no basis in actual fact. Sorry to have wasted your time.

Oh wait, there is one point I forgot to make. Let’s take a quick look at both companies.

Hanes: An apparel company well-known for their socks, T-shirts, and undergarments.

Hormel: Producer of SPAM, Dinty Moore, and a variety of other foods, most notably Hormel Chili. I have an extremely hot tip from a trusted culinary insider that the meat used in this chili is just “good enough” to not be made into dog food. Interesting. Low-grade meat is notorious for its blindingly quick layover in the human digestive system. More notorious yet is its even hastier, comically-explosive-bat-out-of-hades escape from that digestive system.

Do you see the link? Why else would the nutritionally bankrupt products of Hormel be kept on shelves, unless they were serving a higher, more sinister purpose than simply gratifying the quivering gullets of the drunk, the poor, and the drunk poor? Picture the stereotypical consumer of a can of Hormel Chili — it’s a grizzled man in a beater and tighty-whities, shoveling that slop into his mouth like an immigrant coal stoker in the boiler room of an early 1900’s cruise ship.

I posit that Hormel is a multi-tiered puppet enterprise of Hanes, who is using the constant onslaught of almost-dog food blemished shirts and soiled underpants to create sales in an impoverished demographic that would under any other conditions hang on to their clothes if they weren’t covered in revolting meat stains and fecal matter.

Before you go out and buy that next pack of private delicates or can of lubricated swill, remember: you are a mere pawn in a high stakes game benefitting an over-paid fat cat who wants you to sit on your couch and sh*t your pants.

Investigation in process: is the upholstery industry a fringe benefactor of the Hormel/Hanes conglomerate?

A large number of people are familiar with Bruce Wayne’s traumatic childhood and rise to heroic chiropteran vigilance. There exists in the world of DC Comics another, lesser known character who had a similar beginning, yet whose grief manifested itself in a far, far lamer way than the sworn ideal of heavy-handed justice to criminals.

Who: Arnold Wesker, aka The Ventriloquist

Similarities to Bruce Wayne: Arnold Wesker and Bruce Wayne were both born into privilege, AW into the Mafia, BW as the son of a doctor. AW witnessed the assassination of his mother, BW saw both of his parents murdered by a mugger.

This is where the two fork off — Bruce Wayne became Batman. Arnold Wesker, taciturn by nature, vented through the art of ventriloquism. He lets the dummy that he has absolute control over abuse him, both mentally and physically. Wesker has no superpowers, other than being talented at ventriloquism, and even there he is limited. While ventriloquizing, he is unable to pronounce a “B” sound, so the dummy has a speech impediment, and pronounces “Batman” as “Gatman.”

How long until Hollywood scrapes the bottom of the barrel and makes a movie out of this guy?

Case Study #1: There exists in the world of quantum mechanics a thought experiment (composed by Erwin Schrödinger) that goes something like this:

A (hypothetical) cat is caged up in a steel box for an hour. Within the box, safe from any tampering from the cat, is a Geiger counter with a small amount of radioactive substance. There is an equal chance that one of the radioactive atoms may or may not decay over the course of the hour. If decay does occur, it sets off a series of events that explodes a flask of acid, killing the cat. If none of the radioactive atoms decay, the cat lives.

One of the aspects of this experiment, aptly named Schrödinger’s Cat, is used to show that, while in the box, we have to assume that the cat is simultaneously dead and alive, until the box is opened.

Case Study #2: A friend of mine recently moved into a townhouse complex where acclaimed meteorologist Dave Dahl is known to have lived in the early ’90’s. It is unknown to us some two decades later which unit he actually resided in; only that it was one out of the many homes in the neighborhood.

Screaming, drunken arguments take place over this topic, in the very townhouse that may or may not have been lived in by Dave Dahl: I’m sitting at the counter shouting “YOU HAVE NO F$%^ING PROOF THAT HE LIVED IN HERE,” while my friend tries to drown me out with “YOU HAVE NO F&*$ING PROOF THAT HE DIDN’T,” while the neighbor next door assures his wife, “Don’t worry honey, they’re just arguing about Dahl again.”

A hearty touché goes out to both sides of the argument on that one. Until Dave Dahl himself is contacted, we must assume that Dave Dahl both lived in and didn’t live in that house. (I still maintain that Double-D would refuse to live in a poorly-lit center unit, when a man of his income and prestige in the media could easily afford to secure an end unit with more windows and thus a clearer view of the sky, something that I think a meteorologist would want for his dwelling. Unbeknownst to the current residents, I have been collecting hair samples from every nook and cranny of the place, and holding them up to Google Images of Dave Dahl circa 1990-1994 to see if they match in hue, tone, and “splendor.” No matches yet.).

Case Study #3: The hermaphrodite, owners of not one, but two private sexual zones, are perhaps the most flummoxing of all. While having the properties of both males and females, we come to the inevitable question: if a hermaphrodite is attracted to a male (or female, for that matter), is it heterosexual or homosexual? Much like the cat in the box and Dave Dahl’s supposed house, the herm must be assumed to be simultaneously in two states: hetero and homosexuality. But we can always open the box and see if the cat died or not, and find someone with a Rolodex deep enough to contact Dave Dahl about his rental history. Herms are up in the air for life.

It’s one of those rare questions we’ll never be able to answer, like what would have happened in Back to the Future if Marty McFly actually had wiped out his own existence? How could he have traveled back in time to prevent himself from being born if he had never been born?